You can’t keep us out of the Dzalbay. They can try as hard as they might, but a Victoria beer is about $1.75, and there’s never a cover. I’ll run out of liver before I run out of pesos.

Swinga Tu Madre was playing at the Dzalbay last night. They’ve added another quite capable guitarist to the crew who’s not visible in the video. The violin player puts down his fiddle when he gets weary of trying to saw all the way through it, picks up a trumpet, and teases some more Gypsy Jazz out of that. We geeked out a bit when they played this one:

They represented enough of a lifelong pseudo-ambition for my wife and I to call it a win. We’ve always wanted to walk to the local bistro and hear Gypsy Jazz. Of course we had hifalutin’ ideas about the where and when. We had visions of Paris and haughty waiters ignoring you while anorexic girls smoke greasy unfiltered cigarettes and drink wine they didn’t buy, accompanied by the dudes who did. That’s the beauty of being unable to do much of anything: You never have to settle for second-best of anything, because you can’t even hope to sniff third best. A Rolex and a Timex cost the same if you have no money.

So this was our ultimate flight of fancy for Gypsy Jazz in a bistro:

Not gonna happen. But we were just aimlessly wandering the streets of Merida last night. It was in the low eighties, and it was clear enough to see the sickle moon for the first time in weeks. I see the moon, and the moon sees me. The streets were quieter than a weekend, although the Day of the Dead events pockmark the city with jolly and morbid goings-on. It’s perfectly safe to walk anywhere around here after dark, whether people with skulls painted on their face are abroad in the land or not. The only danger is that you can’t remember the difference between buenas tardes and buenas noches fast enough when confronted with a friendly stranger. Just when you’re screwing up the courage to give it a go, they say, “Hola,” and your house of Spanish flash cards comes tumbling down anyway.

Entirely by serendipity, the Dzalbay loomed in front of us, the light slanting out into the street to compete with the alternating red and green dazzle of the stoplight. Like almost any event of any kind in Merida, Yucatan, it cost nothing to get in. It was a happy accident that a Gypsy Jazz outfit, Swinga Tu Madre (ya, believe me, I know) was performing.

It wasn’t paradise. But it was paradise’s waiting room, surely.